5. Yesterday I took my first collage class with the talented Lori Krein who inspired me to try something similar to her landscapes. Hopefully I'll finish it next week. I was inspired after reading about Melodye's creative journaling here and here. I have a vision in my head of doing one of my own but I'm not quite there yet. I wish I had a local coffeeshop to gather at with friends to do just that.

I am thinking of an inspiration sort of thing, a combo of your Poetry Stretch and Laura's 15 Words or Less. When I was on retreat recently we did some simple poetry prompts with words that I loved and I'm also inspired by photographs. So I might start off with just inspiration and then, as the year goes on, add in forms so I can learn them too.

My goal for the coming year is to make TIME for more poetry so I can LEARN more poetry.

The villanelle thing turned out to be something I really enjoyed, and will try again. I'd given the form a go twice before, ending up with one abandoned half-draft and one particularly crappy poem, but I think I see some of where I went wrong in those bygone projects. Hope you enjoy working with the form!

Thanks for the support on the collage class. You sharing your lovely journals certainly helped push me out there. I'll share when I finish something. I'm working on a landscape right now. I thought I would have finished it Tuesday but the leaves of one of the trees aren't working out at all. I might not work on it tomorrow. I might work on an assemblage tomorrow.

I would LOVE to go to the coffee shop with you. I'm thinking a trip to LA is in my future next year.

Who am I?I was born on the Cancer/Leo cusp and share a birthday with Ernest Hemingway and Robin Williams. The similarities don't stop there as I can go from depressed to ecstatic without ever passing go. I feel scared most of the time though my friends call me brave and I find it easier to believe in my friends than to believe in my own abilities to make what I want out of my life.

Who am I? A wife, a mother, a daughter, and even, gulp, a grandmother.

Who am I? A writer who never gets tired of playing with words, even when the words are hard to find. A writer of books for children and articles for grown-ups and many things in-between.

"Successful writers are not the ones who write the best sentences. They are the ones who keep writing. They are the ones who discover what is most important and strangest and most pleasurable in themselves, and keep believing in the value of their work, despite the difficulties."
--Bonnie Friedman

"As writers, we must be willing to feel our sadness, our anger, our terror, so we can reach in and find our sweet vulnerability that is just sitting there waiting for us to come back home."
--Nancy Slonim Aronie

"Writers write about what obsesses them. You draw those cards. I lost my mother when I was 14. My daughter died at the age of 6. I lost my faith as a Catholic. When I'm writing, the darkness is always there. I go where the pain is."
--Anne Rice